Organizers estimate 2 million in Rio for pope

Cardinals meet with Pope Francis at St Joaquim Palace in Rio de Janeiro, Saturday, July 27, 2013. Pope Francis took his message to shake up the Catholic Church to bishops from around the world on Saturday, challenging them to get out of their churches and go to the farthest margins of society to find the faithful and preach. (AP Photo/Luca Zennaro, Pool)
— AP

Cardinals meet with Pope Francis at St Joaquim Palace in Rio de Janeiro, Saturday, July 27, 2013. Pope Francis took his message to shake up the Catholic Church to bishops from around the world on Saturday, challenging them to get out of their churches and go to the farthest margins of society to find the faithful and preach. (AP Photo/Luca Zennaro, Pool)
/ AP

Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for the "exodus."

"Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas," he said. "Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age."

At the same time, he dismissed as empty the allure of rival congregations promising "lofty, more powerful and faster" solutions.

Francis asked if the church today can still "warm the hearts" of its faithful, with priests who take time to listen to their problems and remain close to them. He said he wants a church that acts like a "mother" who not only gives birth to her children but cares for them and holds their hand.

"We need a church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy," he said. "Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of `wounded' persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love."

"We need a church able to dialogue with those disciples who ... are wandering aimlessly, alone, with their own disappointment, disillusioned by a Christianity now considered barren, fruitless soil, incapable of generating meaning."

The Vatican said Francis read the five-page speech in its entirety to the 300 or so bishops gathered for lunch in the auditorium of the Rio archbishop's residence, and noted that the talk was both the longest and most important to date of Francis' pontificate. He will issue a similarly lengthy and important speech on Sunday to the bishops of Latin America before heading back to Rome after the conclusion of World Youth day, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.

Despite Francis' critical assessment of the state of the church in Brazil, the pope's reception in Rio has shown that he at least can still draw a crowd. Copacabana beach's 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of white sand was nearly half full by Saturday afternoon with young people gathering for the Catholic youth festival's final vigil Saturday night before Sunday's morning Mass. During a ceremony Friday night, Brazilian media estimated that 1.5 million people were on hand, filling up only a fraction of the beach.

The Argentine pope began his day with a Mass in Rio's beehive-like modern cathedral where he exhorted 1,000 bishops from around the world to go out and find the faithful, a more diplomatic expression of the direct, off-the-cuff instructions he delivered to young Argentine pilgrims on Thursday. In those remarks, he urged the youngsters to make a "mess" in their dioceses and shake things up, even at the expense of confrontation with their bishops and priests.

"We cannot keep ourselves shut up in parishes, in our communities when so many people are waiting for the Gospel!" Francis said in his homily Saturday. "It's not enough simply to open the door in welcome, but we must go out through that door to seek and meet the people."